Loving God when we can’t see him
DAILY PRAYER (BY SPURGEON)
We have to mourn that we cannot always feel intense love for you as we should. At times you reveal yourself to us so charmingly that heaven itself could scarcely be happier than the world becomes when you are with us in it. But when you are gone and we are in the dark, oh, give us the love that loves in the dark, that loves when there is no comfortable sense of your presence. Let us not be dependent upon feeling, but may we always love you, so that if you did turn your back on us by the year together we would not think less of you for you are unspeakably lovely whatever you do.
If you give us rough words, yet still we would cling to you, and if the rod of discipline be used until we tingle again yet still will we love you, for you are infinitely worthy of love from all men and angels. Make our hearts to love you forevermore. With all the capacity for love that there is in us, and with all the more that you can give us, may we love our Lord in spirit and in truth.
Amen.
VERSE OF THE DAY (COMMENTARY BY SPURGEON) “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)
God looked on us with an eye that saw all our sin and misery, yet he loved us. And he wants us to have a love that, while it sees all the imperfection and all the undeserving in our fellow men, still loves them. If we do not love those whom we see, the apostle says that we lie when we talk of loving God whom we have not seen.
